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TL;DR: Is tl;dv or Sembly AI Better for Your Team?
When it comes to tl;dv vs Sembly, it’s easy to put them into these groups: Sembly is the compliance specialist; tl;dv is the better everyday tool. Only one of them has a proper free plan.
- Sembly has no real free plan — its “Basic free trial mode” deletes anything older than 4 months. tl;dv’s free plan is unlimited recordings and transcription, no card, no clock.
- Sembly meters AI output even after you pay: 5 AI documents and insights per month on Pro ($29/user/month), 40 on MAX ($39). tl;dv’s paid tiers run unmetered.
- Sembly wins compliance depth — HIPAA, audit logs, custom SSO on MAX — but enabling HIPAA mode disables most of its integrations, including every CRM.
- Both offer MCP access on Pro — query your meetings from ChatGPT or Claude.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index survey found that 66% of AI users are spending more time on high-value work because of it. The question is no longer whether your meetings should get an AI note-taker, but which one.
Sembly pitches itself at compliance-heavy teams that need every meeting captured and traceable, but it has restrictive free trials. tl;dv kickstarts with a generous free package, no credit card required, and handles all of the work after the meeting without an enterprise price tag.
Sembly vs tl;dv: Quick Features Comparison
| Feature | Sembly | tl;dv | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free package | Trial mode onlyBasic free trial mode: 4-month retention, capped uploads, slower processing | Free foreverUnlimited recordings & transcription in 40+ languages, AI notes for 10 meetings/month, no credit card required | tl;dv is a working tool at $0; Sembly's free mode is an extended evaluation with a deletion clock |
| Integrations | Several nativePM, collaboration, storage, Sheets + Zapier | 5,000+Plus API & webhooks | Niche stacks favor the bigger bench |
| CRM sync unlock tier | Limited on BasicWorkspace-wide automations on Pro ($29/user/mo or $20/mo billed annually) | Pro$29/seat/mo ($18 annual), including automatic CRM sync | Neither locks CRM sync behind its top tier |
| MCP access (query meetings from ChatGPT/Claude) | YesPro and above | YesPro and above — MCP server, API & webhooks | A 2026 capability few tools in the category have properly pushed |
| Email follow-up drafting | Via AI documentsMetered: 5/mo on Pro, 40/mo on MAX | IncludedEmail follow-up drafter on Pro, unmetered | The after-meeting email is the most common output — metering it changes daily usage |
| Compliance features | Strongest kitSOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA on MAX, consent tracking, audit log, custom SSO, US/EU residency | Core coveredSOC 2 Type II, GDPR, EU AI Act compliant, EU/US/JP hosting, consent flows on both recording modes | Sembly wins the US-regulated checklist (HIPAA, audit trails); tl;dv holds the certifications most teams need, with the stronger EU positioning |
| Workspace automations | YesWorkspace-wide on Pro; access controls on MAX | YesTeam-wide integrations & automations on Business | Both push notes and tasks to your tools on autopilot. Gating tiers differ |
| Zapier | YesTriggers for notes, tasks, transcription | YesTriggers for notes, tasks, transcription | An important connector for thousands of different tools |
What Is Sembly, and What Does It Actually Do?
Sembly is an AI meeting assistant that records your calls across platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, and then turns them into transcripts, usable notes, and automatically detected tasks. It’s built for organizations that treat meeting records as documentation. Think finance and legal teams where “what was said on that call” occasionally ends up in front of an auditor.
Compliance-friendly features such as consent tracking and automatic risk detection are available on the Pro plan ($20 per user/month when billed annually), or on the Max plan ($30 per user/month), you’ll get HIPAA compliance. This is helpful for a specific kind of buyer that handles anything classed as “protected health information” (PHI), and you need to keep that data confidential, encrypted, and control who can access it.
tl;dv is the all-rounder. It covers the same core job — recording, transcription and capturing actions, but spreads its weight across the whole team: CRM sync for sales teams, coaching signals for managers, follow-up drafts for anyone who owes an email after the call, and a free plan generous enough that half the company can use it before procurement gets involved. Choosing the all-rounder doesn’t mean abandoning the compliance conversation either: tl;dv is GDPR compliant, SOC 2 certified, EU AI Act compliant, and runs consent flows for both of its recording modes.
What Is Semblian and How Do AI Documents Work?
Semblian is the virtual assistant feature built into Sembly AI. Semblian acts as an AI coworker; generating documents from your meetings, follow-ups, and reports built from what was said on the call. The catch is the volume: AI-generated documents and AI insights are capped at 5 per month on Sembly’s Pro plan and 40 on MAX, so document automation is metered even after you’ve paid. If drafting output from meetings is your main use case, that cap should be the first thing you check. It can be a deal-breaker.
tl;dv gives you 10 x Ask AI queries for free. Then for the same price as Sembly’s capped Pro plan, tl;dv provides unlimited single-meeting Ask AI. While Sembly provides a sample of what a virtual assistant can do, tl;dv embeds it into your team’s workflows.
How Does Sembly Join Meetings? Does It Need a Bot?
Sembly records meetings by sending a bot into your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams call, where it appears in the participant list like any other attendee. Every plan also includes microphone recording, which captures conversations directly from your device.
For admins, Sembly pairs the bot with consent tracking on its Pro plan, so organizations can manage how participants are notified. That’s consistent with the traceability pitch that runs through the whole compliance-friendly product, though it’s something that tl;dv also provides, for both bot and bot-free usage.
Talking of which, tl;dv supports bot-free recording on its desktop app, allowing you to record audio directly from your device. This means it’s not limited to specific platforms and no bot will join the call, letting the conversation keep its normal rhythm. The downside? Recording device audio only means you get no video recording (this is available via tl;dv’s browser-based bot mode). tl;dv also has Voice Printing that learns your voice and identifies you in future transcripts automatically, regardless of whether you use a bot or not.
Sembly’s lack of choice locks you into meeting platforms that it’s compatible with. tl;dv gives you the flexibility to use either if and when you choose.
Sembly Pricing: How Much Does It Cost in 2026?
Sembly runs three self-serve plans, and one Enterprise:
- Basic at $17 per month
- Pro at $29 per user/month
- MAX at $39 per user/month
- Enterprise tier has custom pricing
*All prices are for monthly billing. You can save around 30% by billing annually.
Sembly doesn’t offer a free plan, but does provide a free trial.
tl;dv vs Sembly: Pricing at a Glance
| Plan | Sembly | tl;dv | What You Get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic vs Free | $10/user/moOr $17/user/mo when billed monthly — 1 user per workspace | $0Free forever | Sembly Basic is the paid entry: unlimited meetings, transcription, task detection, 1-year history. tl;dv covers the same recording and transcription basics at $0. |
| Pro vs Pro | $20/user/moOr $29/user/mo when billed monthly ($240/year annually) | $18/user/moOr $29/user/mo when billed monthly ($216/year annually) | Sembly Pro: multi-meeting AI chat, 5 AI documents + 5 AI insights/month, consent tracking, MCP access, up to 40 users. tl;dv Pro: unlimited AI notes, CRM auto-sync, follow-up drafter, 5,000+ integrations, MCP server & API. |
| MAX vs Business | $30/user/moOr $39/user/mo when billed monthly ($360/year annually) | $29/user/moOr $39/user/mo when billed monthly ($348/year annually) | Sembly MAX: HIPAA compliance, audit log, custom SSO, 40 AI documents + 40 AI insights/month, up to 500 users. tl;dv Business: unlimited multi-meeting AI insights, scheduled AI reports, playbook monitoring, objection handling — no usage-based AI fees. |
| Enterprise | CustomPriced by sales | CustomSSO, SCIM, advanced admin controls | Both move into custom procurement territory for organization-wide security, admin, and support needs. |
What’s Included in Sembly’s Basic Plan?
Basic provides unlimited meetings, transcriptions and summaries and includes automatic task detection. However, it’s limited to one user per workspace, media upload is capped at 5 hours, and meeting history expires after a year.
What’s Included in Sembly’s Pro Plan?
Pro is where Sembly becomes more of a team tool: up to 40 users, multi-meeting AI chat, workspace automations, and MCP access. Compliance features such as consent tracking and retention settings are now unlocked.
What’s Included in Sembly’s MAX plan?
MAX goes a step further for those compliance-heavy industries and supports HIPAA requirements. It also boosts AI docs and insights to 40 per month. You’re only allowed 500 users max.
What About tl;dv’s Pricing?
tl;dv has a generous free package that starts with unlimited transcripts and 10 AI meeting notes per month. tl;dv’s annual billing unlocks greater discounts in comparison, not to mention tl;dv’s Business plan unlocks a whole bunch of features that Sembly doesn’t touch: sales playbook monitoring, objection handling, scheduled reports and deep multi-meeting insights.
Does Sembly Offer a Free Tier and What Are Its Limits?
No, it’s not a free AI notetaker. There’s no $0 plan but there is a “Basic free trial mode,” no credit card needed and no expiry date. The catch is retention and limits — anything older than 4 months is permanently deleted, uploads are tightly capped with no option to buy extra credits, and processing runs slower than on paid plans. Trials on Pro and MAX are the traditional 7-day kind and require payment details up front.
This is where tl;dv excels: an actual free plan with unlimited recordings and transcriptions in over 40 languages, including AI features. No card details needed, no expiry, and no 4-month deletion clock.
Are There Usage Caps on Sembly’s Paid Plans?
Yes, and they’re worth knowing about. Pro caps AI-generated documents at 5 and AI insights at 5, and holds meeting history for two years; MAX raises the caps to 40 of each and makes history unlimited. Workspaces top out at 40 users on Pro and 500 on MAX. Uploads are metered too — once your upload minutes run out, processing more pre-recorded files means purchasing extra credits. So the plan you pay for meters the AI output you presumably bought it for.
With tl;dv, other than the 10 x AI meeting notes and 10 x AI queries thrown into the free package, there is no ceiling on any of the paid plans.
Which Languages Do Sembly and tl;dv Support, and Which Has More Accurate Transcription?
Sembly supports 40+ languages, however this isn’t as good as it first seems. Each workspace can only select two languages at a time, and per Sembly’s own helpdesk, meetings containing languages outside your selection “might be transcribed inaccurately,” with notes generated in whichever language dominated the call.
In practice that means Sembly handles multilingual work by pre-declaration. If your calls predictably run in English and German, you set English and German and it performs well. If a Spanish-speaking client joins unannounced, or a call drifts between three languages, the transcript degrades. To make matters more confusing, changing workspace-level language settings requires an admin role on Team and Enterprise setups.
Sembly does offer a Custom Vocabulary feature on Pro which helps with jargon-heavy industries, but it’s not enough to save an other-language transcript.
tl;dv also transcribes in 40+ languages but it has automatic language detection so you can speak as many different languages as you want in a single call and the transcript will capture them all. This is a scenario few competitors handle well.
How Do Sembly and tl;dv Connect to CRMs, and What Data Is Synced?
Sembly connects natively to ten CRM systems: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, Copper, Freshsales, Attio, Capsule, Close, and TeamLeader. These all connect through Sembly’s Automations system, plus it has Zapier for everything else. What syncs is meeting output: notes, transcriptions, and tasks get pushed automatically into the right contact or company record, matched by participant email, with filters by meeting type, organizer, or keyword so only the calls that matter reach the CRM.
tl;dv has a similar system for auto-syncing exactly which meeting details you need to the specific fields you need them. Granted, it doesn’t have quite so many native integrations, but it still has enough with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Pipedrive and more available natively. tl;dv also has Zapier for 5,000+ additional integrations.
While Sembly has a good native CRM integration list, Automations run limited on Basic. For workspace-wide automations, you’ll need Pro ($29 per user/month).
Sembly and tl;dv both offer MCP access on their Pro tiers (the protocol the NSA described in May 2026 as the de facto standard for connecting AI to external tools), letting you query your meetings from ChatGPT or Claude. It’s a capability few tools in the category have pushed at all.
tl;dv’s main advantage here is that automatic CRM sync unlocks at Pro ($18/month when billed annually) alongside an email follow-up drafter.
Are tl;dv and Sembly GDPR Compliant, SOC 2 Certified, and HIPAA Ready?
For Sembly, it’s a yes on all three counts. Sembly is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant, offers US and EU data residency, and supports HIPAA on its MAX plan ($39 per user/month), which is the gate that decides whether US healthcare-adjacent teams can use a note-taker at all. Given seven in ten Americans expect AI to make their personal information less secure, these compliance features are pretty important to keep up with. The rest of the compliance kit follows the same logic up the tiers: consent tracking and retention settings on Pro ($29 per user/month) and audit log and custom SSO on MAX.
Just make sure your team has read the fine print; HIPAA mode switches most of Sembly off around the edges. If you enable it, it disables most Native Automations, including every CRM integration, leaving only Notion, Microsoft To Do, Google Tasks, and Slack notes connected. Even Zapier webhooks is shut off. The compliance tier and the integration story don’t fully coexist.
Also, the regulatory ground is still moving. EU negotiators agreed in May 2026 to postpone the EU AI Act’s high-risk obligations to December 2027, the first amendments since the Act passed.
tl;dv holds the same core certifications such as SOC 2 Type II and GDPR. It also hosts your data in the EU by default, but US, Japan, and other places are available on request. The difference isn’t compliant versus not — both clear the core bar — it’s how far past the bar your specific industry needs you to go.
Does Sembly or tl;dv Use Meeting Data to Train AI Models?
Sembly does train AI models on your meeting data by default, yes. If you’re on Enterprise, you can manually switch the toggle in the settings and opt out. When data is shared, the content is anonymized with personal information redacted.
tl;dv never trains AI on your meeting data. You don’t need to remember to flip a toggle. It’s the default. Always.
What Do Reviewers Actually Say About Sembly?
Sembly reviews are solid rather than spectacular: 4.6 out of 5 on G2 across 45 reviews as of July 2026, with the strongest feature scores on the fundamentals such as call recording and AI text summarization. The praise is unglamorous but important: it captures meetings reliably and the summaries need little editing.
The complaints are more structural. One user flags that long meetings (3 hours +) get split into fragments. He said there were also occasional bugs where the recording was lost. Particularly annoying when it’s such a long recording.
On the same G2 comparison, tl;dv holds 4.7 out of 5 across 463 reviews — a ten-times-larger review base. Sembly has a total of 1 review in 2026. tl;dv has pages full.
When Should You Choose Sembly? And When Is tl;dv the Better Pick?
Choose Sembly when you have specific compliance requirements that are driving the actual purchase. Sembly is a specialist that earns its niche. Just be mindful of those features that need to be turned off in order to gain the full compliance package. See how it stands up to other Sembly alternatives if you’re still unsure.
Choose tl;dv for almost everything else. The free plan is a working tool rather than a countdown, it auto-detects languages mid-call, recording works bot-free across anything your device plays, and the paid tiers put CRM sync, follow-up drafting, and multi-meeting intelligence to work without usage meters. The certifications most security reviews ask for, like SOC 2 Type II and GDPR, are covered.
tl;dv vs Sembly Verdict: Who Should Use Which Tool?
| Your Team | Better Fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance-heavy industries (healthcare, finance, legal) | Sembly | HIPAA on MAX, audit log, custom SSO, consent tracking — built for teams whose meetings get audited. Know that HIPAA mode disables most integrations. |
| Sales & customer success teams | tl;dv | Automatic CRM sync and follow-up drafting from Pro, unmetered — plus playbook monitoring and objection handling on Business. |
| Multilingual teams | tl;dv | 40+ languages with automatic detection and mid-call switching; Sembly asks you to pre-select two languages per workspace. |
| Solo users & freelancers | tl;dv | A free plan that works indefinitely — unlimited recordings and transcription. |
| Enterprise IT | Depends | Sembly for the US-regulated checklist; tl;dv Enterprise for SSO, SCIM, and admin controls with an EU-based data posture. Both price by sales conversation. |
See where your team lands
Record bot-free, transcribe in 40+ languages, and push every meeting into the tools you already use.
Start with tl;dv free Free forever plan. No credit card required.FAQs About tl;dv and Sembly
Does Sembly's bot announce itself in meetings?
Yes. Sembly’s bot introduces itself with an automatic message when it joins and sits in the participant list. Hosts can decline or remove it, and it leaves on its own after roughly ten minutes of silence.
tl;dv’s desktop recording adds no participant to the call, with consent flows keeping the recording announced. Alternatively, tl;dv also has a bot which acts in a similar way to Sembly’s. Admins have consent control for their entire team.
Can Sembly record in-person meetings?
Yes. Microphone recording is included on every Sembly plan and is designed for in-person conversations. It’s an offline-meetings feature so online meetings still need the bot.
tl;dv’s desktop app records system audio, covering online meetings without a bot and in-person meetings by picking up on the audio.
How long does Sembly keep your meeting history?
It depends on your plan: one year on Basic, two years on Pro, and unlimited on MAX. Free trial mode deletes anything older than four months. Worth mapping against your own retention policy before committing, since meeting records have a habit of mattering later.
tl;dv’s recordings and transcripts stay available on the free plan, with unlimited uploads and storage from Pro.
Does Sembly work with Webex?
Yes, in beta. Speaker names in Webex only attach when the host enables live captions.
tl;dv can record Webex through its desktop app, since it captures whatever your device plays rather than joining the call.
Is annual billing actually cheaper?
Yes, Sembly currently advertises 30% off annually.
tl;dv’s annual billing runs up to 40% off. Pro drops from $29 to $18/month, Business from $39 to $29.
